Same Time Next Week

Chapter 11

On Saturday morning, Sky was awoken by the sound of the front door opening. It was only seven a.m. when she rolled over to look at the clock. Katy had moved out, she should have been alone in the house. She sat bolt upright and listened; someone was definitely shuffling about in the hallway. She threw herself out of bed and slipped on her dressing gown. She opened her bedroom door and peeped around it to see the front door wide open and a suitcase and some boxes on the mat. A few seconds later the landlord, Wilton Dearne appeared, carrying another one. He shut the door with his heel and waddled towards the kitchen.

‘Morning,’ he said, as he passed her.

‘Morning,’ she replied automatically; there was certainly no warmth in the greeting. She knew he couldn’t just turn up and enter like that because he’d done it once before and Jordan had thrown a fit about it, citing tenants’ rights. But Jordan wasn’t here any more and she knew any threat from her about her rights was likely to fall on stony ground.

Luckily, they’d needed to have only minimal dealings with their landlord in person, because he gave Katy and her the willies – not literally, although they suspected he would have, given the chance. Wilton Dearne was an odd character, with his greasy floppy hair and raspy chest. He dragged his feet over any maintenance that needed to be done and when the gas fire started popping, Jordan had to threaten him with court action before he did anything about it. He occasionally gave them an obligatory twenty-four hours notice to enter and ‘check things were in working order’ which probably meant to confirm there was no evidence of drug-fuelled orgies and the place was kept clean and tidy, as per the strict tenancy agreement.

Sky heard him rattling about in the kitchen and when she went to investigate, found him putting some things in the fridge.

‘Can I help you, Mr Dearne?’ she asked.

He carried on without stopping as he replied, ‘No, thank you.’

He must have known she would be wondering what he was up to and he was making her work for information.

‘Can I ask what you’re doing?’ she said.

‘I’m putting some food in this fridge,’ he answered her, with a huff of annoyance at having to explain himself.

‘Whose food?’ she asked, pressing him for details that were essential.

‘Mine,’ he responded, pausing momentarily to pull up his joggers. They were stained and fraying at the bottoms. He didn’t look like someone who owned four rental properties outright. She and Katy had wondered if the other three were as shabby as theirs was.

He closed the fridge door and picked up the empty cardboard box.

‘I’m having some work done on my house,’ he said. ‘So, while that’s happening I’m going to be staying here. No point in having two rooms going begging when I could be using one.’

He smiled at her as he passed and she caught a whiff of his scent which seemed to be a nasty mix of smoke and stale sweat, nothing like the Vibrant Leather fresh scent of Jordan or the sweetshop perfume of Katy.

‘Besides, it’ll be good for you having a male on the premises,’ said Wilton, throwing the words over his shoulder. ‘A bit of company for you.’

Amanda picked up a copy of the Yorkshire Standard when she was in the shop buying some milk. It was a daily paper and on Saturday there was a culinary supplement focusing in on one of the restaurants of Yorkshire. She knew that her friend Barb had been good as her word because on the front page, advertising what was inside, there were the words. ‘Meet Ray Morning: Texas comes to Barnsley.’

She couldn’t leave it until she got home so she took out the supplement to read in the car. The whole front cover was a full-colour photo of Ray standing behind his shiny counter. And she was amused to discover that Ray’s surname was in fact ‘Morning’ so the ‘Meet Ray Morning’ tag had a double meaning and made him sound extra sunny.

The pie is magnificent, bursting with blueberries and it comes with a quenelle of clotted cream and home-made ice cream that scores a solid twelve out of ten on the delicious scale…

‘Oh, god bless you, Barb,’ said Amanda aloud. She’d given him some real generous lineage and the photo was fabulous; there were more pics inside of a towering burger and Ray holding a plate of pie, laughing. Lord, he was hot. If this didn’t get all the eligible women in the area running up to Spring Hill, nothing would. Amanda was salivating reading the descriptions of some of the dishes, Barb really had a talent for food reviewing. He hadn’t got too extensive a menu, he explained, because he didn’t want to drive himself or his kitchen team into an early grave. There would be a change of menu on the first of every month, but the most popular favourites would remain a constant, when he knew what they were.

Amanda found herself smiling. She’d planned to go shopping in Meadowhall this morning but it could wait. She thought she’d call up to Ray’s and take a copy of this article with her, hoping that she wouldn’t find him alone, drumming bored fingers on the counter. Plus there was that other thing she wanted to ask him about, which might or might not be a rubbish idea.

When she reached Spring Hill, she was delighted to see there were cars parked up. She walked in to see six booths filled up with people and a familiar face acting as serving staff: Jean had been Bettina’s waitress and was in her mid-seventies. A masterstroke.

When Ray looked up and saw her, his face was split in two by a grin. He came rushing at her from behind the counter. She prepared herself for a hug, but he just took her shoulders in his hands and squeezed her. Damn.

‘I owe you. Breakfast is on me, whatever you want.’ He pushed her to an unoccupied booth and slid into the other side.

‘No, no,’ she protested, ‘I just came to see how you were doing and to bring you one of these.’ She handed him the newspaper. ‘They’ve given you a great write-up.’

Ray took it from her. She’d already folded it to the page so he could read about himself and he gobbled up the words quickly.

‘And you have Jean working here, I see?’

‘She walked on in and asked for a job. I can’t say I needed a waitress with no customers to serve but I found myself saying yeah, why not, I had a weird hunch. This’ – he tapped the newspaper with his finger – ‘is amazing. And, er… you must have been doing PR for me because I’ve had some of the place’s old customers come up saying they’d heard about pensioner discounts.’

She winced slightly. ‘I hope that was okay. I shouldn’t really have said it, in case you didn’t want to go with that suggestion.’

‘Oh my goodness, yes, that was absolutely fine to say… And the reporter really ran with your “Meet Ray Morning” tag. I might use that on my free Daily Trumpet advert. You were right, they did offer me one and I said I’d come back to them with what I wanted them to print.’

‘That’s good news. Ray, I’d like to see if I can start a group for women and I need a venue. I have a small budget that would cover some teas and coffees and biscuits. I don’t really know where to start, other than to find some place to hold it and—’

‘There’s a room in the back,’ Ray interrupted her. ‘There are chairs and a table. Wanna see?’

Well, that was rather convenient, thought Amanda. ‘I’d love to.’

‘Come on.’ He led the way, past the loos to an adjacent door.

‘I’m just using it as a storage room at present. I didn’t really know what to do with it. Jean said that the previous owner used it as a smoking room in bygone days.

There was a sturdy, square table shoved against the wall and some wooden folding chairs resting in a stack beside them. The room had been painted recently, as the walls were a clean, pale grey.

‘I pulled the old linoleum up and found these floorboards underneath, aren’t they great?’ said Ray. They were indeed, far too nice to have been covered up, though a sanding and polish would see them restored to all their former glory.

‘It’s a work in progress, but any good for you?’

‘It’s perfect,’ said Amanda with a smile. She pictured herself with a group of women all sitting around the table, talking, chatting, just letting off steam about what they were going through in life, sharing things they’d learned that might be useful to others. And maybe out of those sessions suggestions might emerge about improving things in the workplace for women. She wouldn’t advertise it as a focus group, though; a friendship group would be more attractive.

‘What day would be best for you?’

‘Take your pick,’ said Ray, ‘though maybe avoid Fridays and Saturdays.’

‘Oh, absolutely. I was thinking of Tuesday, maybe?’

‘Just tell me what you need me to do. You can have it gladly, no charge for any of it,’ said Ray, opening his arms wide as if welcoming in the idea.

Mrs Pettifer turned up at eleven to pick up the teddy bear that Sky had mended for her. She was crying before she’d even seen it, the mere prospect of having it returned to her was enough. The finished product nearly finished her.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘Just like it was when I bought it for him.’

‘I used the pieces I had to cut off as stuffing, so not a bit has been thrown away,’ said Sky.

Mrs Pettifer held the bear out at arm’s length to inspect it and then pulled it to her chest, held it as she must once have held her boy. Sky could imagine the thoughts running through her mind, memories both sweet and sad vying with each other for dominance.

‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ Mrs Pettifer said, her voice a whisper riding on a crest of tears.

‘Oh, I’m just happy to help,’ said Sky. ‘Here, let me wrap him for you.’

Mrs Pettifer watched as Sky wrapped the bear up in white tissue paper, as she had once wrapped up her baby boy in a soft white blanket. They are not ours to own, they are merely on loan from God above, the priest had said at his funeral and those words had brought a modicum of comfort where there was little comfort to be had at all. She’d had to scratch for scraps of it over the years.

Her hand was shaking as she held her bank card against the machine to make payment. She put the receipt in her handbag and turned to leave with a nod and a smile, quickly, before she made even more of a fool of herself. If only she knew how many times in the repair shop they’d seen similar, thought Sky: a grown man in floods of tears after Tony had mended his father’s bagatelle board; the old fella who’d broken down on switching on the bakelite radio Adam had restored, which his late wife had bought him as a wedding present, and hearing, by sheer coincidence, their first dance song at their reception playing. He was convinced it was a message from her to say she was with him, and no one was going to argue with that. Things that could be mended often took the place of loved ones who couldn’t, and assumed their importance. Emotions settled in possessions, wove invisible threads around them that attached themselves to people. But one day Mrs Pettifer would be gone and the teddy she treasured would be someone else’s rubbish. The here and now was a treasure in itself, because it was all that was important, all they could be certain of; that much Sky knew for sure.

She wrote down the sale in her accounting book and picked up the bear she was working on now: a special bear for someone she knew just a little but liked a lot.

Her father had taught her everything she knew about her art. She’d been holding a needle since before she could read. He’d been like a bear himself, huge, mightily built, cuddly and kind, not a mean bone in his body. He was an apprentice trained upholsterer originally, who somewhere along the line had encountered the joy of toy restoring, and that became his profession. People called him ‘the teddy bear man’ which was sweet in the beginning, before it turned out to be his curse. How anyone could have thought he could be a killer was beyond those who knew him, but gossip got inflated by lies and people were quick to accuse, because it was human nature to need someone to blame.

This year it would be twenty years since Wayne Craven, the Pennine Prowler, had been arrested and convicted. Sky knew it would all be dragged up again and it would keep getting dragged up until the mystery of the second man was solved, even though there were too many people who remained convinced it already had been.

Erin typed the words ‘Pennine Prowler’ into her laptop. She’d meant to look him up after she last went up to Bon’s shop but it slipped her mind with all the house stuff she had to do. She vaguely remembered seeing the case on Crimewatch and the newspaper headlines asking, ‘ Is This the Lancashire Ripper ? ’ , but she was a twenty-something living her best life in London at the time, and both then and now, had no fascination with crime unlike some. She didn’t want to read disturbing details, didn’t want to read about people with warped personalities. Her interest, though, had been piqued by the scene between Sky and those dreadful women last Monday because it was an odd thing to insert into a conversation, those comments about growing up in the shadow of a killer, unless they had significant meaning. There was plenty of information on the case: she read a selection of stories covered by everyone from the Daily Mail to the Daily Trumpet . Give or take a few details, she got the gist of what it was all about.

The Pennine Prowler, Wayne Craven, fitted the profile of a serial killer as if he’d been moulded especially for it. He came from a dysfunctional family and was picked on and bullied at school for his small size, his pale skin, ginger hair, his light, high-pitched voice and low intellectual ability. As a grown-up, he wasn’t attractive to women and how he treated them reflected the anger he felt at constantly being rejected by them, although none of them ever reported him to the police. Had they done so, and had there been a record of his DNA in the database, lives might have been saved; which caused a lot of extra heartache for these abused women in the form of survivor’s guilt. He could also be glib, a smooth-talker when it suited and eventually charmed a much older woman into marrying him after a courtship too brief for her to uncover the rot in his soul. He was arrested only two months after the wedding and she never believed he was guilty, despite the damning DNA evidence and his eventual confession.

There had been a single survivor – Gillian Smith – from one of the earliest attacks, before he had refined his methods to leave no victims alive. She was found by an early morning dog walker in Skelshill, Lancashire, blue-lighted to hospital and there put into a medically induced coma to help her chances of recovery. It was nothing short of a miracle that she lived and had some, albeit sketchy and very fragmented, recall of what had happened to her on that night. She was adamant there were two men: one spoke a lot, the second remained silent and spectral, but he had been much bigger and more brutal than the other. But essential DNA evidence from that attack had been tragically lost by a young SOCO which might have confirmed the Pennine Prowler was actually a folie à deux , plus the police at that stage were reluctant to believe Miss Smith, given the battering she’d taken. Much later, recovered DNA from subsequent attacks suggested there was one perpetrator only and the samples obtained pulled up no matches on any database.

It also didn’t help that the police were concentrating on the Lancashire side of the Pennines, where all the incidents took place. They were convinced it was a local man who knew the area inside out. They were, unbeknown to them, not too far off the mark with that as Craven had been born in one of the gritstone villages bordering Saddleworth, and moved over to Penistone with his mother when his father ran off with another woman. She returned to visit her family there often, taking young Wayne with her.

Years passed. Then Gillian Smith, by chance, happened to be in a pub in Millspring, Yorkshire where Craven was drinking and she recognised his voice. It had been unmistakable. She rang the police from the toilets. Craven was taken in for questioning and his DNA matched the saved samples. Every attack made was linked by similarities, trademarks, but there was a certain chaotic element to some of them that lent a marked difference. By now, the police experts had begun to suspect Craven might have committed those attacks alone but that the others had been carried out with someone else more organised and meticulous. A second man, as Gillian Smith had insisted all along.

The police had done their best since then to make Craven give this other person up. They’d leaned on him: Why would you be happy with him out there while you are taking the rap for both of you , they’d said, but he had stuck to his story that he’d always acted alone. That in itself had indicated that this must be someone Craven felt extremely loyal to. He was an odd personality, dysfunctional and complex, and yet he could be fiercely loyal in exchange for the smallest kindnesses: that much had been clear in prison, and conflicted with the psychiatric assessment that he was a true psychopath.

Then, five years into his sentence, he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour and turned to the Church for comfort – or insurance. The police found a crack to squeeze into when Craven said he was finally ready to tell them the truth: that there was someone else, but he toyed with them, manipulative to the last. Maybe he really had intended to disclose the name with his dying breath, but he went downhill too rapidly to keep control of the narrative when a stroke left him unable to speak. The police interviewed him again in hospital, reeled off names of people he knew, had worked with, had worked for, was related to; people who had protected him at school, lent money to him to bury his mother, were kind to his wife when he went inside. He didn’t give up the name, and slipped from them in too easy a death.

Erin found a sensationalist headline from five years ago: WAYNE CRAVEN TOOK HIS SECRETS TO THE GRAVE… OR DID HE? A retired policeman had been interviewed about the cases he’d been involved with. He’d been the one at Craven’s deathbed, reading out the names. He let slip a curious detail: that the only name the dying Craven responded to in any way was that of his lifelong friend: Edek Urbaniak, known locally as ‘The Teddy Bear Man’ because he was a restorer of toys.

‘Wow,’ said Erin aloud. It couldn’t be a coincidence: Sky Urban, Edek Urbaniak and the bear connection. Was this her father? Is that what the blonde had meant about living under the shadow of the Pennine Prowler – some more under it than others ?

There was a scathing article about some DNA which was lost by human error and could possibly have led to the killer or killers much earlier and saved seven women’s lives. That was some cross to carry for the person who was responsible, thought Erin.

She typed in ‘teddy bear man, Wayne Craven’ and skimmed through the entries. She found a death notice from six years ago:

Edek ‘Eddie’ Urbaniak, known affectionately as ‘The Teddy Bear Man’. Penistone, died peacefully in Juniper Hospice.

And in the comments someone had written:

‘ Rot in peace, you murdering bastard .’